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Ancient Peruvian skulls found buried in Florida backyard

The two skulls, of a 10-year-old boy and older man, date to 1200 to 1400, and show signs of being from Peru or South America, thousands of miles and a millenium from Winter Garden, Fla.

“The mystery is how they ended up there,” medical examiner Jan Garavaglia said today. “We don’t have any way of finding out.”

The skulls were discovered in January when a plumber installing an in-ground pool came upon a piece of bone and reported it to the police.

The bones, it turned out, had a lengthier history than the 30 years or so since they were buried in Florida. When x-rayed by the medical examiner’s office, it was clear that the bones were hundreds of years old, and that the human tissue on the cheek of the skull had been mummified. The skulls featured an “Inca bone,” a telltale sign of a human from the Incan culture of Peru, Garavaglia said.

Tip: Strange Times

Archaeologists and anthropologists from the University of Central Florida and Yale were consulted to try and trace the origins of the skulls. It’s possible that the bones were brought from South America into Florida when transporting such things was not against the law, as it now is. But is remains a mystery how they ended up there. It was quite a surprise to find the relics and, then, to realize their antiquity and point of origin.

When I was in college there was a blocked off closet in a professor’s office. They opened it up during renovations and found a Peruvian mummy that had been stored there for over 80 years.

It’s strange that the skulls in this story were buried in the backyard. If they were smuggled or brought in legitimately, you’d think the people in question would want to deliver them for profit or put them in a collection for prestige or to contribute to the field of anthropology. This is like one of those writing exercises where they tell you to start the story with the buried skulls being found, and then you have to finish it and come up with a reason why. There are many possibilities, but it is a rather unusual set of circumstances for sure.